The difference between an absurd main event and a weirdly fun one? It's all in the details

It was during Tuesday’s UFC 152 conference call – after Jon Jones uttered the modern-athlete cliche of all modern-athlete cliches (“It is what it is…”) but before Vitor Belfort began inventing awesome new phrases (“I’m like a young dinosaur…”) – that UFC President Dana White attempted to explain how and why the light-heavyweight title fight at UFC 152 had come to be. In the process, and without knowing it at the time, he accidentally explained a lot about the UFC’s current approach to emergency matchmaking after a tidal wave of injuries and withdrawals.

“It wasn’t that Vitor was chosen,” White said when peppered with questions about why the UFC would pick a middleweight to fight for the light-heavyweight title. “We didn’t call Vitor up and choose Vitor. Vitor stepped up and took the fight. Guys that were next in line for the fight wanted nothing to do with it.”

Little did White know that, a day later, his organization would be announcing a non-title fight between middleweight champ Anderson Silva and light-heavyweight journeyman Stephan Bonnar after losing the main event of UFC 153 in Rio de Janeiro. There’s another bout where, while it’s not exactly the matchup anyone would choose, it is the matchup we ended up with. Because, hell, somebody’s got to fight somebody. The UFC can’t just keep canceling events, can it?

This is not the way it’s supposed to work. Ideally, you should only get a crack at the champion after earning it in the cage. And ideally, you should earn it in the cage against other guys who are at least in the same weight class as the champ you’re earning a crack at. It’s just that, once main-eventers start tearing out their knees and getting knocked off their motorcycles (side note: really, Jose Aldo? A motorcycle? Have you learned nothing from the cautionary tale of Frank Mir?), that’s when “ideally” flies right out the window and goes running blindly through rush hour traffic. That’s when the biggest fight of your life goes from being something you have to climb a mountain for to something you have to pick up the phone for. One man’s tragedy, as they say, is another man’s opportunity to get beat up by a legend for a whole lot of money.

But that’s not to say that Jones-Belfort and Silva-Bonnar are the same species of mismatch. They’re different situations, with nuances all their own. While they both share some similarities, there are good reasons why one is more justifiable than the other.

For starters, there’s the issue of a UFC title. Specifically, there’s the light-heavyweight title, which is up for grabs in the UFC 152 main event. Championship belts are a funny thing. They’re like money in the sense that they only mean what people think they mean. The UFC has spent a long time convincing us that its belts are more valuable than all the others, and it’s been pretty successful (just ask the guys who used to be WEC champs). The problem is, when it decides to offer up that belt to whoever’s willing to take the fight, rather than only putting it up for grabs when a worthy contender has risen through the ranks, it’s unintentionally telling us that the belt itself doesn’t really matter, that it’s just a visual aid for the purposes of ticket and pay-per-view sales.

For instance, take White’s explanation of why Belfort was worthy of a shot at the 205-pound champ. Also note that he launched into this explanation in response to a question about why the UFC didn’t just wait until there was a legitimate light heavyweight ready to challenge Jones for the belt.

“First of all, Vitor’s a former heavyweight champion and former light-heavyweight champion,” White said. “For people to say Vitor’s 185 pounds, Vitor Belfort was world champion at 205 [pounds] and a world champion at heavyweight. Vitor’s fought everybody. … Name any name in the history of the sport, Vitor’s fought them. … This is a very dangerous fight for Jon Jones. For anybody to doubt whether Vitor Belfort should be getting a fight with Jon Jones is out of their mind.”

Did you get all that? Belfort deserves this shot because he’s been around a long time and because he held a couple UFC titles before. Granted, the last time he had a UFC belt was 2004, and he held it only briefly after a TKO stoppage over Randy Couture due to a lacerated eyeball, but hey, what matters is that he was a champion. Therefore, somehow, he is forever eligible to fight for any title at any point, and if you even question it you must be insane. Not even just wrong or misguided or kind of a jerk, but flat-out crazy. By this same logic, Jones vs. Tim Sylvia (another former UFC champ who’s fought almost everybody) would be such a reasonable, sensible fight that anybody who dared say otherwise would have to immediately up their meds.

It’s a classic move from the fight-promoter playbook. Say something completely ridiculous, then act like it’s everybody else who’s being absurd. What’s really amazing is how often it seems to work. So often, in fact, that White has come to rely it on a little too much in these difficult times.

Still, try as I might, I can’t work up the same outrage for Silva-Bonnar. Maybe it’s because it sees the champ going up in weight rather than down. Maybe it’s because it’s a non-title affair where the belt stays at home, keeping whatever imagined value it may have intact. Maybe it’s just because, after everything the latest Rio event went through in recent weeks, I can’t blame the UFC for throwing up its hands and booking a just-for-the-hell-of-it fight.

And don’t kid yourselves, Silva-Bonnar is exactly that type of fight. It’s violence for the sake of violence. It’s a fight between two guys who apparently felt they had nothing better to do and didn’t mind making some money. Yes, a win would be a huge upset for Bonnar, and a loss would be somewhat image-shattering for Silva, but taking the title out of the equation has a way of lowering the stakes and making it clear that this one is just for kicks. Remember when Silva offered to save UFC 151 by fighting a light heavyweight to be named later? Same idea here, and Bonnar is that light heavyweight.

It all comes down to a difference in the value placed on volunteering. If you tell me that you can get a lucrative but mostly meaningless fight in the UFC through sheer down for whatever-ness, I can accept that. If you tell me that the same willing spirit is all it takes to get a title shot, I can’t. White can give us the hard sell on Belfort’s resume all he wants, but he can’t convince me that a middleweight became a top light heavyweight by virtue of picking up the phone. He can, however, convince me that a kind of weird, Godzilla vs. Mothra-type main event is better than no main event at all. Because it is, as long as we can appreciate it for what it is, rather than questioning the sanity of anyone who points out what it obviously isn’t.